Both myself and my cousin have experienced a lot more problems with desktop applications in Gentoo. Summary of some things I've noticed that I never had under Manrdake or other distro's:
* Some programs after compilation from source quit immediately with a segmentation fault (xfs is one such program)
* KDE on my cousin's system completely froze. Mouse still moved but the desktop, and X, stopped responding (no ctrl-alt-backspace). Linux had not crashed. This was not unique because not too much later the same thing happened to me while in KDE.
* Galeon when I choose "Exit with session" crashes every time.
* Other problems, the above are the ones I remember at the moment.

But more recently have changed to this, but most applications are not compiled with the new settings:
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXXFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

So, any suggestions of what's going wrong (since my cousin's system experiences the same problems I think it must be a setting or something)?

Well I don't have the problem (few months ago I also used i686 and O3 for my athlon system and everything worked fine, well almost everything, apart from some minor glitches), but it definitly depends on your compiler flags, but by using -fomit-frame-pointer you probably make it worse._________________"Remember there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.", Frank Zappa

The problem is, on my cousin's system I didn't change his optimisation flags at all, they are still the same as the initial optimisations that I used. So it's not the result of changing the flags mid-way.

Your thread title is "crashes more then windows", and yet you haven't mentioned a single instance where Linux has crashed for you. There is clearly a difference between an operating system and programs that run on an opererating system (or crash in your case ;).

If there are specific problems with programs you may want to tackle them one at a time. If you're having a lot of problems you could always try a stage 1 install as it seems people are having more luck with it.

Your thread title is "crashes more then windows", and yet you haven't mentioned a single instance where Linux has crashed for you. There is clearly a difference between an operating system and programs that run on an opererating system (or crash in your case .

Yeah, I just wanted a catchy heading. I am certain linux itself is not crashing, just applications running on it.

Malakin wrote:

If there are specific problems with programs you may want to tackle them one at a time. If you're having a lot of problems you could always try a stage 1 install as it seems people are having more luck with it.

I installed as a stage 1 install, so that won't solve the problem, not unless I change my flags I guess.

Are you guys running emerge clean frequently? Old packages can cause problems/instability.

In any case, it sounds like you guys are missing something really essential and that this is just a case of a bad configuration.

I only just installed this system about a week ago, so the packages were very fresh. Any suggestions on what the bad configuration may be? That's sort of why I posted this message, in the hopes that anyone had a useful suggestion of where the problem may be. If I just go and do a stage 1 install again, the problems will repeat, since my cousin and I installed the same time with similar config (I used reiserfs and he used ext3).